UNIT THREE - Ecological Interconnections and Interdependence

Question 1

What is Cap and Trade? What is Carbon tax? Which do you think is better?

Answer 1

Cap and Trade- Cap= A set limit on pollution. Trade= A Market in which companies can buy and sell their extra pollution limit.

Carbon tax- Basically, companies have to pay a tax on the amount of fossil fuels you emit.

Question 2

What are Smart Growth Goals?

Answer 2

Smart growth is an approach to development that encourages a mix of building types and uses, diverse housing and transportation options, development within existing neighborhoods, and community engagement.

Question 3

Climate change + Global Warming. What happened at COP21? What were Trudeau’s 5 principles? How are we going to achieve them?

Answer 3

At COP21, world leaders decided to tackle climate change the same way, however, many empty promises were made.

Trudeau’s 5 principles were:

1. Act based on scientific evidence & advice.
2. Support a low carbon economy.
3. Work with provinces and indigenous people to help fix the climate change crisis.
4. Tackle our climate change challenge and then help poorer countries with theirs.
5. Make our economy’s main focus clean tech, jobs and infrastructure and that we will contribute 2.6B over the next 5 years towards green initiatives.

Question 4

Consumption Rates (what do we produce and how does it go through the flow of consumption?)

Answer 4

1. Extraction- Here we extract primary resources
2. Production- Add chemicals to natural resources to make certain products
3. Distribution- Externalized costs causing things to be cheaper
4. Consumption- 99% of the things we buy is trashed (they want us to trash it buy more of it)
5. Waste- We produce waste and then we burn it which causes pollution.

Question 5

What are the stages of population? (Malthus’s theory)

Answer 5

1. Low Growth- Very high birth and death rates (no countries live in this stage any more)
2. High Growth- Decreasing death and birth rate (African, Latin American and some Asian countries)
3. Decreasing Growth- People start to have less children (China, India, Mexico, Brazil, Chile)
4. Low Growth- Very little population growth ( USA, Canada, most European countries)
5. No growth- Death Rate becomes higher than birth rate (Italy, Japan)